Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 43

than working both “with nature” and with the indigenous knowledge of farming peo-
ple—and as imposing centralized capitalist control upon peasant farmers. The technol-
ogy made peasants dependent upon externally manufactured inputs; it threatened the
loss of genetic diversity and environmental devastation; and it would bring poverty and
be the cause of violence in societies. A classic source for these views—which depend sig-
nificantly on an idealized view of the “peasant” (see Shome, this volume)—is the Indian
scientist Vandana Shiva's topic The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991). For Shiva
(who holds a PhD in the philosophy of science) and others, the people who would most
benefit, in the end, from the technology would be the mainly American chemical and
engineering companies that were seen as being the principal suppliers of the inputs that
the GR required, and as having been able to prise open developing country markets as a
result of the imposition of US power. It was this argument, having to do with the extent
to which the GR could be seen as an imperialist, capitalist project, that would ultimately
impoverish peasants of the former colonies (an important source for these arguments
was an article by Harry Cleaver, published in 1972), that brought together the Left and
the environmentalists.
How much more does the potential gene revolution open itself up to exactly the same
criticisms, seeming as it does to involve even more profound “tinkering with nature,”
and depending as it has done to a great extent on the activities of a small number of
mainly American corporations—and especially on one of them, Monsanto, which had
already earned a terrible reputation for some of its products (Robin 2010; Monsanto
Song). “Food sovereignty”—a term that the Left has used to express its resistance to cor-
porate control of agriculture—is now believed to be imperiled, and “GMOs” are seen as
playing a large role in such corporate control, in what McMichael (2005) calls the “cor-
porate food regime” (see also Pechlaner and Otero 2008). The transnational farmers'
organization La Vía Campesina brought the term “food sovereignty” to prominence at
the World Food Summit in 1996, posing it as an alternative to neoliberal policies. Food
sovereignty is taken to mean peoples' rights to define their own food and agriculture
policy, and to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade, outside
the control of big capital and without fear of the dumping of cheap food by third coun-
tries (Patel 2009). The gene revolution, however, according to anti-GMO scholars and
activists, means “enclosing of the commons”—in this case the private corporate own-
ership of genes that include the outcomes of millennia of collective human activity in
cultivation, plant breeding, and selection. The legacy of the GR has disposed the Left to
fight the “biopiracy” of GM technology—when corporations in rich countries with lim-
ited biodiversity go prospecting for genetic material in poor countries—and the threat
that it poses to livelihoods and food sovereignty. For the 816 signatories in the open let-
ter to M.Diouf cited in our second epigraph, the GR has already caused devastation, and
the gene revolution threatens to wreak even more havoc with nature and societies.
Other scholars, however, strongly believe that the GR has had positive consequences for
humanity as a whole, and that genetic engineering can realize similar, positive results for
agriculture as those it has brought (without causing much controversy at all) in medicine.
Some argue that it is morally wrong for small numbers of vociferous activists to attempt
to deny societies, and especially poor people in poor countries, the possible—indeed,